© 2008 Aras. All Rights Reserved.

Proven Innovation for Better PLM Solutions

The Aras Innovator Advanced Model-based Enterprise SOA for PLM Combining the Model-based Approach with the Service-Oriented Architecture

MOST ADVANCEDtechnology companies

2007 20062008

MOST ADVANCEDtechnology companies

2007 20062008

MOST ADVANCEDtechnology companies

2007 20062008 2007 20062008

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Contents Executive Summary 2

Conventional Approach Creates Problems 2

The Need for Greater Flexibility 3

Introducing Aras Innovator 3

Unique Model-based Approach 4

Delivering Unmatched Flexibility 5

The Power of Portability 6

Making Upgrades Easy 6

Simplifying Integration 7

Microsoft Platform Certified 7

Customer and Partner Value Creation 8

Closing Summary 8

Aras Innovator ® model-based enterprise SOAis running in production at

Fortune 500 companies such asMotorola, Delphi,Rolls-Royce, andIngersoll-Rand.

For additional information visit www.aras.com

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Executive Summary

Aras® provides Microsoft enterprise open solution software. The Aras

product, Aras Innovator®, delivers comprehensive, full-featured enterprise applications that leverage proven Internet technologies, common Microsoft platforms, and open industry standards using an innovative approach that provides unmatched flexibility while maintaining upgradeability. By doing so Aras dramatically reduces the time, cost, and effort necessary to customize and deploy enterprise applications, adapt them to changing business conditions, and upgrade them to new technology versions.

On top of the Aras Innovator application framework Aras delivers a suite of enterprise solutions that include enterprise product lifecycle management [PLM], new product development & introduction and quality compliance processes as well as other mission-critical business process management solutions. Additional solutions, integration adapters, and clients are available as Community solutions and can be downloaded, shared, and enhanced on the Aras Community Network [aras.com].

This paper does not cover functional details of specific Aras solutions, and instead concentrates on the underlying model-based SOA technology developed by Aras for creating and running enterprise solutions.

The Aras Innovator enterprise SOA was designed with the premise of delivering powerful, flexible and supportable solutions that deploy quickly and adapt easily to support a company’s mission-critical strategic business processes given the ever changing nature of today’s business environment.

The result of Aras Innovator’s unmatched flexibility and unparalleled upgradeability is a dramatically lower Total Cost of Ownership [TCO].

Conventional Approach Creates Problems

Enterprise applications have contributed significant value to businesses over the last few decades. Unfortunately, businesses have paid a high price for these achievements, most often in the form of multi-million dollar Total Cost of Ownership [TCO] due to overly rigid systems that are difficult to implement and challenging to adapt to changing business requirements.

Gartner Research estimates that over a five year period more than 50% of the TCO for an enterprise application is spent on consultants and internal resources necessary to implement, maintain, and update the system. Years later many companies are still unsure if they have actually achieved a true Return On Investment [ROI].

Many conventional enterprise system vendors have masked the rigid nature of their software by convincing customers to deploy “best practice” solutions. However, a company will inevitably be confronted with a situation where the vendor’s “best practices” do not support

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specific competitive practices. At this point the company is confronted with two unattractive options:

Do not change the system – If the company opts not to customize the system’s “best practices” the competitive position in the marketplace is placed ‘at risk’ due to an inability to innovate and continuously adapt business process to changing conditions.

Customize the system – If the company opts to customize the system complex recoding and schema changes are required. As most companies know first hand, these customizations are complicated and costly, and the company becomes locked into the customized code. Complex coding and schema changes are required which are time consuming, resource intensive, disruptive, expensive, and creates significant upgrade obstacles.

Both of these options are unacceptable to companies today that strive to achieve competitive advantage with information technology.

The Need for Greater Flexibility

Businesses need flexible enterprise applications that can be quickly tailored to support company-specific competitive processes and easily changed to adapt to today’s dynamic business environment. In order to meet this challenge a new level of enterprise application flexibility is required. Improved software adaptability enables companies to easily and cost effectively develop unique applications to support complicated business processes and practices that deliver:

• Differentiated product and service offerings that excite customers

• Shorter process cycle times that improve responsiveness to customers

• Better profit margins that ultimately increase shareholder value

In addition to the strategic benefits greater software flexibility provides a company realizes a dramatic reduction in the amount of time and IT resources necessary to deploy and maintain applications translating into significant ownership cost savings.

Introducing Aras Innovator

Aras Corporation has taken an innovative approach combining proven technologies, common Microsoft platforms, and open standards to create the Aras Innovator® enterprise application framework. Aras Innovator utilizes a unique model-based, service-oriented architecture [SOA] that delivers powerful, full-featured enterprise applications with substantially greater flexibility.

Aras Innovator is a Web-based, n-tier, service-oriented architecture composed of web clients, application server(s), database(s) and file server(s) and is based entirely on standard Internet protocols including HTTP / HTTPS, XML and SOAP [Simple Object Access Protocol].

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The SOA web services are implemented in the Microsoft® .NET CLR languages optimized for flexibility, performance, and security. By utilizing the Microsoft technologies Aras Innovator takes advantage of the common Microsoft platforms such as the Windows Server System, Microsoft SQL Server, and the .NET Framework which make the costs of the associated infrastructure significantly less than J2EE-based systems while providing excellent performance, scalability, manageability, and security.

In addition, Aras Innovator’s SOA enables numerous configuration options for Microsoft technologies adding capabilities with products such as the Microsoft Office Suite, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, PerformancePoint Business Intelligence, Outlook Exchange Server, IBF & InfoPath, BizTalk Server, the Dynamics line of enterprise applications, and Microsoft others products. These options enable companies to combine a wide range of Microsoft technologies to deliver robust applications that leverage existing IT infrastructure as well as integrating with other business systems such as ERP systems like SAP and Oracle and PDM/PLM systems like Siemens UGS, Dassault, and PTC.

Unique Model-based Approach

The truly unique aspect of the Aras Innovator enterprise application framework is the model-based approach. Aras Innovator takes the premise of defining business processes within enterprise software using graphical models to the next level by running the system directly from the model in real-time.

As opposed to “model-driven” systems in which a model is created graphically and traditional source code is generated which is then compiled, linked, tested, debugged, and ultimately deployed, Aras Innovator’s model-based approach uses a run-time model to define the business objects. The advantage of the Aras model-based approach over

Figure 1: Aras Innovator Enterprise Application Framework Architecture

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the model-driven approach is considerable. Changes to enterprise applications in Aras Innovator are made in real-time as opposed to weeks or months using conventional compiled code-based systems including model-driven systems. Benefits of the model-based approach include:

• Real-time changes to business rules, forms, workflows, lifecycles, and the data model without complex programming

• Graphical drag & drop solution development with dynamic schema modification for fast and easy application creation and extension

• Separation of business logic and technology simplifies upgrades and enables solution portability

• No proprietary languages to learn

An important point that requires clarification is that Aras Innovator is not running interpreted code. Interpretation of code never occurs, because the models themselves in Aras Innovator are stored in a predefined schema that is utilized by a set of compiled Web services in the SOA. These Web services perform dynamic evaluation of the business object model. This critical difference is central to Aras Innovator’s ability to deliver solid performance while enabling unmatched flexibility.

Delivering Unmatched Flexibility

Aras Innovator’s model-based approach enables the rapid creation, modification, and extension of enterprise solutions through the combination of forms, workflows, file vaulting functions, relationships structures, security access, and numerous other application capabilities at a business level. Forms, flow charts, and process diagrams are used to define applications. An application is modified by changing a diagram in a graphical solution studio editor instead of programming a block of code. When a change is made the running system is updated instantaneously.

The same browser-based editors that Aras developers use are available

Figure 2: Model-based Approach Simplifies the Change Process

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to anyone with the appropriate permissions. Intuitive solution studio editors make working with applications straightforward. Developers can also use VisualStudio to create external solution components such as Microsoft Office Smart Clients and solution add-ons.

Because Aras Innovator is delivered by a common framework, applications inherently interoperate. Every application developed with Aras Innovator shares a consistent feature set and capability structure with the familiar Microsoft look & feel.

Another important aspect of the Aras Innovator model-based approach is that the models are defined entirely in XML and stored as XML templates. The XML templates subscribe to the SOA Web services in Aras Innovator. The use of XML templates to describe the models that define the business objects, workflows, and screens is significant for several reasons. Working with XML is widely understood and XML files are easy to manipulate at the text level as well as with graphical editors such as those in Aras Innovator, and most notably, XML files are portable.

The Power of Portability

Portability is of specific importance because the sharing of enterprise applications is made fast and easy. All that is required to move an application between two different Aras Innovator systems is simply export the XML file from one system and import it to the other system. The file can be FTP’ed, emailed, or put on a memory stick. This capability is useful for a number of situations such as:

• Migrating customized business logic for an upgrade to a new release of the underlying Aras Innovator SOA technology

• Moving new features from a development environment to a production environment

• Creating a new application and moving it to an existing system instance

• Sharing a business process between two different divisions of a business

The portability of Aras Innovator applications is significant because even extensively tailored applications can be moved from one environment to another quickly and with minimal effort. In contrast conventional enterprise applications require months and sometimes years of complex and costly work to move which creates significant issues for upgrade.

Making Upgrades Easy

Regardless of the amount of tailoring an Aras Innovator enterprise application has undergone, upgrades are straightforward and easy. The combination of the model-based approach with the SOA results in a complete separation of system description and underlying technology.

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The entire system definition is described in the model’s XML template. For persistent store the XML template is normalized into tables and columns within the database and stored along with the end user instance data. The complied code of the SOA web services which defines the behaviors and actions available to the model is .NET managed code.

The significance of the separation is profound. Upgrades to new releases of the underlying Aras Innovator SOA technology are straightforward entailing only the installation of the files.

Simplifying Integration

Aras Innovator’s open interfaces enable seamless interaction with other enterprise systems. Integration is simplified by open Application Programming Interfaces [APIs] federation services that link deep into the architecture.

The APIs send and receive XML / SOAP messages and publish a complete data dictionary providing a standard interface that makes the exchange of data with other systems or integration products, such as Microsoft BizTalk Server, straightforward.

The federation capabilities enable the incorporation of data from other enterprise systems without directly managing the data within Aras Innovator.

In addition, .NET integration capabilities are available for direct integration with ADO, ODBC, flat file, or direct to another system’s API.

Integration adapters for SAP and other ERP systems as well as a wide variety of CAD and PDM systems are available as commercial solutions.

Microsoft Platform Certified

Aras is the only enterprise PLM solution that has ever been certified for the entire Microsoft platform including Windows Server, SQL Server, and the .NET Framework. In fact, Aras is the only enterprise PLM solution to achieve certification on any of the Microsoft platform product.

“Certified for” testing is the most comprehensive testing Microsoft conducts comprising approximately 100 test cases for each Microsoft product tested to independently confirm a solution’s compliance.

The certifications achieved by Aras provide the highest level of corporate confidence available for mission-critical enterprise solutions.

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Customer and Partner Value Creation

The flexible nature of Aras Innovator enterprise applications enables unique value creation potential for Aras customers and partners.

For customers Aras Innovator enables previously unattainable business process innovation and dramatically accelerates continuous improvement. By enabling progressive business practices a company can attack competitors in new ways to capture market share.

Another valuable benefit Aras Innovator provides is the ability to consolidate and rationalization legacy and point applications into a single, modern solution environment. The ability to quickly create powerful, new enterprise solutions that seamlessly interoperate and easily integrate with mission-critical applications provides a cost-effective way to retire legacy systems.

For consulting companies that deliver enterprise software solutions for complicated business processes, Aras Innovator provides a vehicle to both deliver greater value to the client and increase revenue generation. A larger proportion of the consulting engagement can be spent on strategic business consulting because fewer programming resources are require to create, integrate, and modify applications. With Aras Innovator the senior consultants are able to spend more time working with the client on the critical business issues and still come in on budget.

In addition, consultants and systems integrators can create and package specific industry solutions and unique high-value applications to provide new revenue opportunities by productizing domain expertise.

Closing Summary

Today successful companies are seeking new advantages in the marketplace through business processes and technologies to outmaneuver the competition. However, many are struggling to achieve the level of agility required to execute quickly and capitalize on business opportunities. One of the primary obstacles for today’s companies lies in the rigid and cumbersome nature of their conventional enterprise applications and the excessive costs to change and support the systems.

Aras believes that to meet the challenges of the future, enterprise solutions must serve as an agent of change, as opposed to an obstacle. Aras Innovator combines proven, secure and scalable technologies using an innovative approach that delivers the first truly supportable, flexible enterprise applications resulting in a dramatically lower ownership cost.

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info@aras.com www.aras.com

© 2008 by Aras. All Rights Reserved.

About Aras

Aras provides performance driven companies with the most advanced Microsoft enterprise SOA solutions on the market for lifecycle-based business process management. Delivered as Microsoft enterprise open solutions Aras provides control & flexibility to leverage the Microsoft platform and IT skill sets. Businesses achieve a process-oriented approach to innovation and collaboration with Aras solutions for enterprise product lifecycle management, compliance, and more. Aras compliments & extends existing ERP, CRM, and PLM legacy systems through open standards to leverage previous investments. Deliver Results – Better Decisions, Better Processes, Better Software.